Posts by cofty

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

John_Mann I just wanted to say thanks for the conversation.

I would like to pick it up again later.

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

If you wish to appeal I am open to hearing fresh evidence.....

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

"mystery" just will not do.

It is a lame cop-out.

Imagine being in court being asked to account for a deluge of damning evidence that you were a mass murderer and the best you could come up with is "it's a total mystery".

The god of Jesus does not exist. Case closed.

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

Not one single word you have just typed addresses my question about the hiddenness of god.

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

Communion with God. - Fisherman

Then how do you explain the hiddenness of god?

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

The one thing I would add is that my argument is very specifically about "natural evil". In other words suffering that is not a result of human action but which occurs as a direct consequence of the way god designed the world.

I am also defining god as the god of the bible, the god and father of Jesus.

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

as I said earlier I'm hip to that brainwashing jazz

Are you speaking to me from another decade?

How about the fact that you and I and billions are actually alive and well on this Earth today without harm and are sufficient?

Actually millions are not alive and well. Every second of every day infants die of all sorts of horrible diseases, parasites, bacterial infections and viruses that your god invented. Sometimes he murders people by the tens of thousand in disasters that he created.

Your first line of evidence fails.

Next you move on to a random collection of arguments from complexity.

Please tell me which books that present the evidence for evolution you have read. (I predict the answer is zero and that you will ignore the question)

The fact that even morals exist in the first place and show you that God exists

Actually the origin of ethics and morality can easily be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology. Did you know that many species of animal also display an understanding of ethical behaviour? Vampire bats are an interesting example.

If god is the source of morality then why does the bible promote such dreadful ethics? Your god approves of infanticide, slavery, kidnap, forced marriage/rape and genocide. He is beneath me. Before you try to disavow the OT in favour of gentle Jesus meek and mild remember that the murderous, capricious, moral monster of the OT was the god and father of Jesus.

most scientist today would say that he exists

Over 90% of the National Academy of Sciences reject god.

Next you resort to more random arguments from complexity. Once again please tell me which books that present the evidence for evolution you have read. (I predict the answer is zero and that you will ignore the question)

Here are links to 38 examples of evidence for evolution. Perhaps this would be a good place to start your research. See number 31 in particular.

#1 Protein Functional Redundancy
Comparing the sequences of amino acids in ubiquitous proteins confirms the relationship between all living things.

#2 DNA Functional Redundancy
Comparison of the DNA that codes for the amino acids of ubiquitous proteins predicts the tree of life with an astonishing degree of accuracy.

#3 ERVs
Endogenous retroviruses that infected our ancestors are found in the same place of the genome of our closest primate cousins.

#4 Smelly Genes
Hundreds of broken genes that used to code for olfactory receptors in our ancestors are still found in our genome.

#5 Vitamin C
Why humans can no longer make their own vitamin C and what that tells us about our species' history.

#6 Human Chromosome 2
Our second biggest chromosome is made up of two of our ancestors' chromosomes stuck end-to-end.

#7 Human Egg Yolk Gene
Humans and our primate cousins have the genes for making vitellogenin and they are all broken in the same way.

#8 Jumping Genes
Bits of parasitic code called ALU elements prove our common ancestry with primates.

#9 Less Chewing More Thinking
A broken gene for a type of muscle fibre we no longer have tells a story about our evolutionary past.

#10 Non-Coding DNA
In common with many other species huge amounts of our genome originated as copying errors.

#11 Tiktaalik
An amazing fossil discovery illustrates the transition of life from sea to land.

#12 Lenski's E.coli Experiment
An experiment with E.Coli, now in it's third decade, demonstrates the power of natural selection.

#13 Morris Minor Bonnets
Evolution has to make do with building on existing designs as illustrated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

#14 Joey Goes to Oz
Fossil evidence for the origins of marsupials found in Antarctica exactly as predicted.

#15 Robinson Crusoe
The biogeography of oceanic islands presents an impossible dilemma for creationism.

#16 Aquatic Mammals
An excellent sequence of fossils illustrates the evolutionary journey of whales from land to sea.

#17 Belyaev's Silver Foxes
A 50 year breeding programme demonstrates the amazing power of selection and the interconnected nature of genes.

#18 Fish Fingers
The evolution of limbs is mapped out in an amazing sequence of ancient fish fossils.

#19 Goosebumps
A vestigial reflex bequeathed by our hairier ancestors.

#20 Lucy in the Sky...
An exceptional fossil of a 3 million year old hominid.

#21 Footprints in the Sand...
Footprints at Laetoli show our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors were bipedal 3.6 million years ago.

#22 The Hillocks of Hiss...
A vestigial feature if the human ear shared by 10% of the population demonstrates our evolutionary history.

#23 Faunal Succession...
The consistent sequence of fossils found in the rocks can only be explained by evolution.

#24 The Origin of Your Inner Ear...
How the bones that reptiles eat with became the bones that we hear with.

#25 Deep Time...
Scottish geologist Andrew Hutton discovered the proof of earth's great antiquity.

#26 Colour Vision...
How gene duplication - new "information" -and mutation equipped us with trichromatic vision.

#27 Monkeys, Typewriters, Shakespeare, 747s etc...
Evolution is a combination of random mutations and non-random selection.

#28 Something Darwin Didn't Say...
A long term study of pigeons demonstrates how natural selection acts on a local population.

#29 Use it or Lose it...
Fossil genes reveal the history of modern species.

#30 Your Third Eyelid...
The remnants of a nictitating membrane reveals our evolutionary history.

#31 Ten Questions For Creationists ...
The basic facts about reality covered so far pose an impossible challenge to creationism.

#32 Sexual Selection
How female mating preferences led to some of the most remarkable features of living things.

#33 A Tale About Tails
Human embryology reveals our primate history.

#34 Hiccups and Tadpoles
How hiccups are a relic of our amphibian ancestors.

#35 Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Nature's ability to inflict pain and suffering in the battle for survival.

#36 Mass Extinctions
96% of life was wiped out in The Great Dying 250 million years ago.

#37 Testicles
The plumbing of the vas deferens gives evidence of our fish ancestry

#38 The Origin of Complex Cells
How a merger of simple cells made complexity possible

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

Have you ever considered the possibility of a certain faith in being true - Looter

Yes. I was raised to value faith and then I became a born-again christian for 9 years after I left the cult. I know a lot about faith. I concluded that it is not true. I arrived at that conclusion based on a great deal of evidence. The debate is not between two sorts of evidence - it is between evidence and faith. There is no contest.

or maybe all the people who lacked faith will be proven wrong someday.

If you have any evidence that I am wrong about anything please share it. I don't want to be wrong any longer than necessary.

The truth is that we don't really know when it will happen but I will attest that I believe that one day God will let people feel the wrath of him physically on this Earth.

Threats are not a substitute for evidence. That is just a way of you trying to make yourself feel better about having no evidence. Stop it.

The only time belief that actually deserves disrespect is when the faith in whatever is being malicious

Like you just did for example.

Faith-based thinking deserves to be held up to scrutiny and exposed for what it is.

but all I'm doing and others on here are doing is letting people come to realize that we know God exists

No he doesn't.

If you have any evidence the he/she does please share it. I doubt there is a single argument for faith that I haven't considered but if you know something I might have missed I am open to listening to you.

13

Does anyone know what this is?

by Tameria2001 in

jw
friends

yesterday my sister cut her foot on a piece of metal that was sticking out of my yard.

i've lived in my home for almost 8 years now, and well i'm guessing this thing must have worked it's way up to the surface or something, never seen this thing before.

i started to dig it up, and the thing just kept getting bigger and bigger.

cofty

Some sort of rotary cultivator blade.

583

What is the purpose of life?

by slimboyfat in

while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

cofty

I'm not falling for those brain washing questions.

So asking you a simple, respectful question amounts to brainwashing does it?

How weak would your mind have to be for that to be true?

Is it ok to disrespect faith as long as I respect people of faith? Or like most believers do you have difficulty understanding the distinction?

A few minutes ago you demanded respect for your beliefs. How can I respect error? Why should I? If I did that would be dishonest.

Why would you not want somebody to point out the error in your beliefs?